As the title suggests, the album Virgins, Vixens, & Viragos by American mezzo soprano Susan Graham is meant to cover songs and operatic selections (accompanied with piano) having a wide emotional range. It's not always clear which is which in this collection of female figures running from Purcell to Poulenc, and Graham. Graham's strengths -- intelligence and novel choice of repertory -- are fully in evidence here. The album is worth the purchase price for the six Mignon songs (tracks 3-8) alone. These are settings of texts ...
Read More
As the title suggests, the album Virgins, Vixens, & Viragos by American mezzo soprano Susan Graham is meant to cover songs and operatic selections (accompanied with piano) having a wide emotional range. It's not always clear which is which in this collection of female figures running from Purcell to Poulenc, and Graham. Graham's strengths -- intelligence and novel choice of repertory -- are fully in evidence here. The album is worth the purchase price for the six Mignon songs (tracks 3-8) alone. These are settings of texts by Goethe, originally from the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), and it's hard for a non-German audience to appreciate how familiar they were to German-speaking listeners of a century ago. Graham's set of six songs ranging from Schubert to the early 20th century (one by Tchaikovsky in German, another by Henri Duparc in French) gives a feeling of how the original hearers of these songs might have approached them as new versions of very familiar...
Read Less